Gallagher is also an outstanding teacher of creative writing, having taught at various colleges and universities throughout the United States, including Syracuse University from 1980 to 1989 and the Stadler Poetry Center, Bucknell University, in spring 1989. She received awards for teaching excellence from Syracuse in 1987 and from Whitman College in 1997, where she taught an advanced poetry workshop and a course on the works of her late husband, the noted short-story writer and poet Raymond Carver, and gave the baccalaureate address. In May 1989 Whitman College presented an honorary doctorate in humane letters to her.
The eldest of five children, Theresa Jeanette Bond (Tess Gallagher) was born on 21 July 1943 in Port Angeles, Washington, to Leslie O. and Georgia Marie Morris Bond. In the autobiographical essay, "My Father's Love Letters," collected in A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry (1986), she describes her childhood in the "moss-light" of Washington's Olympic peninsula. Leslie Bond left a life of working in the cotton fields, oil fields, and coal mines of Oklahoma during the Great Depression for a career as a logger, longshoreman, and fisherman in the Pacific Northwest. The essay recalls quarrels and bouts of drinking that "terrorized my childhood" and taught her that "the world was not just" and that "any balance was temporary." Some of Gallagher's most powerful early poems might be described as efforts to communicate with or to reconcile with her father.
This is a free page. This page contains 192 words. This
biography contains 6,493 words (approx. 22 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Tess Gallagher Access Pass.
